[troutwine]

> I wish lots of content disappeared - in the past the passage of time was a way to filter for quality, because we only bothered to preserve something worth preserving.

While I agree that preserving through something through time does take intentional effort I disagree that this acts as a 'quality' filter. What we've received from the past comes to us through a surprising amount of accidents, or close scrapes. Beowulf exists now in millions of copies but the original is a single, damaged codex. Was Beowulf worth preserving more than the other, now lost oral poems of that era? Gilgamesh was popular in the ancient world and was told and retold, yet we still don't have and may never have a complete Gilgamesh. Is it not worth preserving? It may be, through sheer blind luck, that in 10,000 years some trade paperback you have in your home right now will be the only written example of your native tongue. Is all the literature composed in your tongue not worth preserving?

> The current archival processes are something so radically new, we don't yet understand how it shapes society.

Are they so new? And, as to how archival practices shape society, I think you need only look at the European Renaissance to see what a rediscovery of the past will do to a people. Or, consider the rediscovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls on Biblical scholarship in the modern era.